Star Trek: The Year Ahead

Happy New Year, friends! Last month I recapped my year of watching and blogging Star Trek. Here’s a rundown of the Trek goodness I’m looking forward to in the coming year: The Next Generation, Discovery, offline shenanigans, and posts for Comparative Geeks! Be sure to check out the poll at the bottom to let me know which posts you’re most interested in reading.

Upcoming TNG Episodes

We Trekkies joke around a lot about the first season or two of TNG being bad, but it only took a couple of episodes to find some interesting stuff, and I’m so looking forward to progress here in my watch-all-the-Star-Trek project. I’d only seen about five episodes of season 1, and I’ve already passed two of them in the first two episodes. Currently my most-anticipated upcoming episode is “The Big Goodbye,” what looks to be a thrilling “trapped on the holodeck” adventure!

“The Big Goodbye,” Memory Beta

Star Trek: Discovery

I admit it, I’d gone full purist on Star Trek in the past few years. I didn’t like the reboot movies one bit, and still haven’t seen the most recent one. I thought they were heavy on explosions and tissue-light on actually making sense. Not to mention that Star Trek started as a scrappy celebration of diversity, and the movies took exactly zero risks. My reaction to the “new TV show!” announcement was a solid groan.

BUT. Every piece of news about this show gets me more excited. The lead is a woman of color (Sonequa Martin-Green from The Walking Dead), we’ll get our first gay character (two seconds in a montage doesn’t count, Star Trek Beyond), and the inimitable Michelle Yeoh as a captain! The fact that they’re promoting their diversity is just as exciting to me as the actual casting.

It’s set pretty early in Star Trek’s chronology, which I find disappointing, and it’s also about Klingons when I think the Romulans have been sorely underused, BUT the protagonist isn’t a ship captain (so that’ll be structurally different) and there’ll be a new alien species introduced. It’ll be available online for a subscription, and also on Netflix, but maybe just for international audiences? Not clear on that. Either way I’m stoked and I’ll do my best to find it.

The Outernet

Sadly, now that the 50th anniversary year is over, there isn’t as much awesome Star Trek stuff going on. The original show ran for three years, why isn’t the anniversary celebration three years long? Anyway, I’m planning a trip to a small local con. I may or may not be designing a tattoo — feel free to guess what it is. And I’m memorizing my favorite Trek speeches, because I’m a nerd. IT’S MENTAL EXERCISE OKAY.

Upcoming Posts

Since upcoming episodes are, well, upcoming, I can’t say for sure what I’ll want to write about there. But aside from that I know I want to write posts about some Star Trek games, cast memoirs, and a couple of behind-the-scenes or otherwise related documentaries. I’d love to hear what kinds of posts you most like to read, though: episode reviews/reactions, listicles, topical essays, outernet reports, reviews of related media or even merch? Let me know in the poll/comments below!

Hi! I'm Hannah Givens. I read about 300 books a year, from nonfiction to picture books and everything in between. I love sci-fi, fantasy, comics, popular science, history, and anything queer, and blog about it on Hannah Reads Books (https://hannahgivens.wordpress.com). On Comparative Geeks, I write a monthly Star Trek column and the occasional geeky extra!

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“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.”
― Simon Pegg